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Saturday was Open Data Day, and KLL (Kathmandu Living Labs, where I am a fellow this year) co-organized an event all about Open Data. I will probably write more about the event, but for now, I wanted to share a presentation that Nirab Pudasaini and I made about the growth of OpenStreetMap in Nepal. See below:

Two of the striking slides, for me, are below. The first one is a comparison of Biratnagar, the third biggest city in Nepal, in July 2011 vs. now. The map was virtually blank in July 2011, while today, you can really use it to get around!

The second slide is an image of the growth of users contributing to the map in Nepal. I generated this slide using the OSM History file for Nepal; each number represents the number of people who had made an edit on OSM within Nepal’s boundaries by a certain time:

Pretty amazing, huh! In June 2011, when the first mapping party in Nepal was held, we had 224 contributors, out of which 25 were Nepali mappers. Today, I would estimate that a vast majority of the 1833 contributors are Nepali mappers. Its been amazing to be a part of this community, and to see so many Nepalis contributing to such an important commons.